It's quite the feat to make professional nice girl Holly Willoughby publicly call you out on your behaviour.

But if one person could manage to make her crack, it would, of course, be Gemma Collins.

The Dancing on Ice reality star has had rather a dramatic 48 hours. Having left Sunday’s live show 25 minutes early because she was “bored”, Holly later slammed her on This Morning for a lack of “professionalism”, prompting Gemma to threaten to quit.

Sources close to her went as far as to claim she thought there was a “conspiracy to bring down the show’s biggest star.”

Meanwhile tales of her diva demands were getting all the more extravagant - from apparent calls for foot massages to wanting her favourite pie and mash being shipped in from London restaurants.

Gemma Collins has been slammed over her diva antics on Dancing On Ice (Image: ITV/REX/Shutterstock)

Viewers had already been told the whole studio - including Torvill and Dean - were kept waiting for 10 minutes while she had a nap. The week before, her introductory video showed her boasting about being “ Beyonce on ice” and the “next Champion skater”, before stumbling out like a gold-sequinned Bambi.

And then there’s the elephant the room - we’re not watching Gemma, 37, but her diva alter-ego “The GC”.

For the majority of Dancing on Ice viewers who didn’t watch the curvy blonde cut her showbiz teeth on ITV2’s The Only Way Is Essex, Gemma has hit Sunday night primetime TV like an avalanche.

But is she - or The GC - really TV’s biggest and most out-of-control diva? Or is the former used car salesman actually a reality TV genius?

Now on her 12th reality show, whatever she’s selling, TV bosses certainly seem to be buying.

Gemma caused fury by delayed rehearsal to take a nap in the afternoon (Image: Instagram)

Gemma’s big break came in 2011, when the mother of former The Only Way Is Essex star Amy Childs, suggested to producers that they might want to screen test a car salesman she knew. Two weeks later Gemma was joining the second series of the show - and the boat was well and truly rocked.

A yo-yo dieter, Gemma’s been anywhere up to a size 24. Then she was just a size 16, but was still dubbed “the curvy” girl among the super skinny cast. Yet rather than dwell on it, Gemma got stuck in - ending up in a love triangle with her now-boyfriend James ‘Arg’ Argent and his on-off girlfriend Lydia Bright.

The reality TV star also appeared on Celebrity Big Brother

It wasn’t long before her loud, brash alter-ego The GC emerged, and Gemma could not be contained to just TOWIE.

Fast forward to today and she’s arguably done better than many of her co-stars in terms of making it to the primetime - and the headlines.

First there was ITV’s Splash! in 2014, where Tom Daley taught her to dive, only for her to end up covered in bruises. After losing out to Michaela Strachan in a dive off, she declared: “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”

She starred alongside Chloe Sims in Towie (Image: ITV)

A few months later, she became the first Towie girl to do I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! but wasn’t even off the helicopter before she broke down, and with mascara running down her face. “Can you stop a minute please, I’m serious just stop,” she screamed at the pilot. “I need to get out, seriously I’m going to be sick, I can’t do it, no way!”

Some 72 hours later she quit the show, moaning that being given porridge was ‘against her human rights’.

“I just don’t want to do it. It’s too hard,” she said. “People that murder get treated better than this, and that’s the truth. Even a murderer gets fed three times a day.”

True that may be, but they also don’t get a handsome payday. Still it only made her more attractive to TV producers. It was clear you’ll never be short of drama with The GC around. She even declared on TOWIE, “I‘m Gemma Collins, I’ve earned my divaship”.

She brought that diva to the CelebrityBig Brother house, in 2016, when just 48 hours in she declared she was bored.

“I am f***ing gamed out. I have had enough of playing games,” she yelled to Big Brother. “It’s like having a job and working 24/7 for two days on the trot!”

Gemma's never been afraid to show her emotions on camera (Image: Rex Features)

And when former EastEnders star John Partridge accused her of making him cry, she was having none of it. “I just don’t believe it to be honest,” she mused, later telling housemates: “You’re obsessed with me and I love it.”

That’s an understatement. Gemma’s also been snapped up to appear on Sugar Free Farm, Celebrity MasterChef, Big Brother (again), All Together Now Celebrities, and Channel 5’s In Therapy among others. And it’s all thanks to a knack of stealing the limelight.

There was the fall through the trapdoor at 2017’s Radio One Teen Awards; that super-shoulder padded dress that upstaged much bigger names than her’s at that year’s ITV’s Summer Party; and an excruiating interview about to answer any questions about her second book “The GC: How to Be a Diva” because the journalist hadn’t been able to read it, after not being sent a copy. The main question the reporter had? “Have you read the book?”.

Gemma later admitted she hadn’t exactly been slaving over a keyboard. “Well, I didn’t sit there writing it, no,” she told Loose Women. “I got offered to do a book, and they said to me, ‘Gem, you’re so busy, how about we get someone to walk around with you with a dictaphone?’. And that’s how we did it.”

Whether she’s conscious of spewing the one-liners is unclear. But she’s definitely is game for a laugh: She’s said yes to naked shoots, yes to recreating the Kardashians’ best Instagrams, even yes to releasing a pop single last September.

She almost broke the Internet with this outfit (Image: WENN.com)

And with more than a million Instagram followers, she’s even shrugged off her new status as queen of internet memes, fully subscribing to Oscar Wilde’s theory that the only thing worst than being talked about is not being talked about.

Gemma is, after all, not a dumb blonde Essex girl. She’s not actually an Essex girl at all.

Born in 1981 in Romford - officially in the London borough of Havering - she’s the daughter of self-made working class parents, Alan and Joan Collins (not, that one). And far from being plucked from obscurity, she was educated at the famous Sylvia Young Stage School, where she fell in love with musical theatre, after calling it “the best education money can buy.”

Yet while she loved everything about the stage, a career in the West End never happened for her. So when she was 31, working on a car lot and the TOWIE producers came calling, she jumped on the next best thing: reality TV.

Somewhat candidly though, the effervescent blonde, has quietly admitted that sometimes she wonders if she should have been more careful what she wished for.

And despite being proud of her plus-sized clothes line, her fame has put an unfair focus on her weight.

She said in 2017: “I probably felt more beautiful before I went on TV. ‘Cos I get so much criticism now. I don’t hate on myself, but I do think my weight has become such a major talking point that people just need to get over it.” She added: “I really suffered from anxiety a little while ago, and I even took tablets, because there have been days when I think I can’t do this any more.”

So is the rude, self-serving alter-ego The GC just a release from that anxiety?

Away from the cameras, her worries haven’t been constricted to the best fake tans and perfect hair flicks. Indeed, she later claimed the reason she was so upset in the jungle was that she had been attacked by an ex-boyfriend just before she flew to Oz. He strongly denied the claims, but police confirmed they had been called to her address.

Then there was the broken engagement with Rami Hawash. Their three-year-relationship ended in 2014 with his claims that she threw an Indian takeway over him in a row, and her claims that he made her “feel bad” and called her a “fatsie.” Even her current man Arg famously cheated on her.

All the while, her mum Joan was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis , and spent three years in a wheelchair, only just being able to walk again, days before Gemma entered CBB.

All the time, Gemma’s OTT diva brand - and shoulder pads - just kept getting bigger and bigger: The more strife she had in her life, the more abuse about her weight she got, the less she seemed to want to be painted as a victim.

Almost in the same sentence as she genuinely admitted she sometimes struggled with fame, Gemma spewed what would become another classic quote from The GC.

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“The Range Rover lifestyle just become normal to me,” she said. “After the first Range Rover I went on to have another four or five, and the last Range Rover I had, I didn’t get the buzz.”

Whether she’s got zero self-awareness, or just knows how to get people talking about her, is up for debate. But one thing’s for sure this homegrown diva is not going to be short of work for a long time to come.

Why? She summed it up best herself, when she made this promise to Big Brother in the Diary Room: “I’ll make it TV gold for you.”